Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Some dangerously sensible people have endorsed Barack Obama

Colin Powell. Michael Bloomberg. The editors at The Economist magazine. What do all these three have in common? They are all harbour Republican sympathies, yet they are all endorsing Barack Obama for a second term.

For Mitt Romney these are dangerously sensible people to be throwing their lot in with Mr Obama, and he doesn’t have anyone on the other side to match them with.

You can tell how much it means to Mr Obama that Colin Powell, a former chairman of the joint chiefs and Republican secretary of state, has backed him – and not just on national security, but crucially on the economy too.

Democrat strategists liked it so much, their closing argument in the Midwest is just an ad re-running the CBS News interview in which Powell explained why he was voting Barack – and it’s not because he shares a skin colour with the President.

The Economist endorsement (courageous, given their readership) is also a terrible sign for Mitt. If the magazine of free-markets and the ‘one per cent’ can’t bring themselves to hold their noses and endorse Mr Romney, who can?

Their backing of Mr Obama is certainly begrudging, but the arguments against Mr Romney must make painful reading for the strategists plotting his ‘etch-a-sketch’ lurch back to the centre in the final month of this campaign.

“The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things,” the editors write, as they puzzle over who exactly Mitt Romney is, and what he might do if he is elected on Tuesday night.

They concede this time voters face an ‘unedifying choice’, but on social issues, foreign policy and the economy they find themselves simply unable to believe in Mr Romney, who spent the Republican primaries refusing to countenance tax rises (even in exchange for ten times the amount of cuts), suggesting immigrants ‘self-deport’ themselves and tacking right on abortion, gay marriage etc.

“Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive,” they write. For Mr Romney, that’s a really hurtful line to read from a paper like The Economist.

And then there’s Mayor Bloomberg, a former Republican, now an independent, who has also come out for Mr Obama because he wants to leave a better world for his daughters.

Even if that is a bit sappy, it speaks to a lack of confidence – like The Economist – about who the Republican candidate is, and what he now believes in.

“If the 1994 or 2003 version of Mitt Romney were running for president, I may well have voted for him because, like so many other independents, I have found the past four years to be, in a word, disappointing,” Mr Bloomberg wrote.

It is amazing – or perhaps it is not – that 18 years after he first ran for office, Mr Romney is still being wounded by the flip-flopping charge. And Mr Fehrnstrom (the etch-a-sketch man) insults voters if he thinks they don’t get that.

Even if these endorsements don’t make a material difference in and of themselves, they absolutely do speak to the big hole in Mr Romney’s pitch to the moderate, middle-of-the road undecided voters who he is now so desperately courting.